The Military Channel, Dr Helen, Kurt Waldheim, and me

My computer’s been down most of the day but I guess the worst of the snowstorm has passed and things are back to normal.

Last week I watched a couple of episodes of Nazi Hunters on The Military Channel, and was especially interested in the one depicting atrocities committed on French partisans and British SOE agents dropped into Western France right after D-Day to prepare for the Allied invasion of France. That episode and the episode following depicted the postwar investigation of the killings by the United States DOJ OSI [Office of SpecialInvestigations] and one of its attorneys, Eli Rosenbaum. This was especially interesting because I was just finishing the book Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt WaldheimInvestigation and Coverup by Eli Rosenbaum with William Hoffer [St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1993], which documented Nazi atrocities committed under the authority of Waldheim in Greece and Yugoslavia. Waldheim later became the United Nations Secretary-General, a position he touted to the limit. As I recall, rumors about a Nazi past began to seep out about as soon as his position there ended.

Did you ever read a book, enjoying it until the last page or two? That’s the way I felt about the Rosenbaum book. In the years since 1993, the evidence against Waldheim and the collaboration of the Austrian media and people in the coverup- recall the enthusiastic defense of him by Arnold Schwarzenegger – has become accepted as valid by the world. Most troublesome was the blatant anti-Semitism that once again arose in Austria during the investigation. Less well-known is the use of Waldheim by the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia’s revered WWII hero MarshallTito. It’s clear from documents obtained in formerly sealed United Nations archives and elsewhere that Waldheim gave KGB agents jobs and top-secret clearance to spy in the UN, NYC and the United States. Evidently Waldheim was bribed by the USSR and Tito to their advantage, thus allowing him to escape prosecution for his Nazi war crimes.

Another interesting aspect of the book was the diminution of respected Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who repeatedly defended Waldheim. Rosenbaum delivers credible evidence that Wiesenthal had mistakenly cleared the former UN Secretary General in an investigation for the new nation of Israel, and he later covered that mistake to protect his reputation. Of course, Wiesenthal had already come under suspicion for his self-promotion and exaggerated claims, e.g., in regard to the capture of war criminal AdolphEichmann in South America, which was actually done by the Israel’s Mossad, which had no interest in credit.

So I’m chugging along with the book until the very end, when Rosenbaum goes on a diatribe about Patrick Buchanan and his “race card” speeches, which Rosenbaum warns us can lead to the kind of hate and civil rights abuses he’s investigated in post-Nazi Europe. I had noticed throughout the book that Rosenbaum demonized the word ‘conservative’ at every opportunity but I was shocked that someone who had seen pictures and proof of the destruction of whole villages and mass executions and slave labor could compare that to Buchanan’s cautions on illegal immigrants coming into our country and changing our culture. Hyperbole and partisan ranting by Rosenbaum, and btw, Buchanan’s warnings seem prescient for here and modern Europe, which is reeling from illegal and legal immigrants and their rejection of their adopted countries.

How DARE YOU send me this trash associating law abiding American citizens with Nazi Germany and Maoist China. I am a psychologist who has sympathy for my fellow Americans who are so “extremist” that they believe in lower taxes and the Second Amendment. Horrors!

What is “killing us” are polarized minds like Kirk J. Schneider Ph.D who is so narrow-minded that he thinks those who have different political beliefs than himself are the enemy and seeks to assign them with a “diagnosis.” What is truly extremist and scary to those of a more conservative or libertarian persuasion is that so many psychologists such as the one below are such political hacks for the Democratic Party. Please take me off your list of hate.

Helen Smith, PhD

What a righteous rant. She has shown us in a few words what we must do in response to liberal intolerance against conservatives in general and the Tea Party in particular. The liberal MSM go along with that intolerance; it’s up to us to fight it at every opportunity, pointing out intolerance, inaccuracies, bias and hypocrisy.